


Fly Me To The Moon

by flibbertygigget



Category: Harry Potter - J. K. Rowling
Genre: Alternate Universe - Fairy Tale, Astronomy, F/F, Light Angst, Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder - PTSD, Post-War, Romantic Fluff
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-12-17
Updated: 2019-12-17
Packaged: 2021-02-26 23:07:47
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,236
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/21827086
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/flibbertygigget/pseuds/flibbertygigget
Summary: In which Ginny is an astronomer, and Luna is a universe-shaking discovery.
Relationships: Luna Lovegood/Ginny Weasley
Comments: 2
Kudos: 38





	Fly Me To The Moon

**Author's Note:**

  * For [natesophie](https://archiveofourown.org/gifts?recipient=natesophie).



> Written for @natesophie for the Witchsweekly Gift Exchange 2019.

On clear nights, when the stars shine so brightly they almost remind her of magic and the full moon is levitated in the sky, Ginny climbs her way up to the top of the Burrow. If Mum knew she’d worry, so Ginny takes care not to wake the rest of the house. When she finally gets to the attic, she opens up the window and heaves herself onto the roof, pulling out the magically-augmented telescope she asked Harry to buy for her.

She finally finds what she’s looking for on a cold night in mid-December. Not that she had any idea what it was before she found it. Astronomy had been first a distraction, then a half-thought-out direction for her now-aimless life. She doesn’t need to hold a wand or brew a potion to be an astronomer, after all, even in the magical world.

Her breath comes out in clouds that look almost solid, clouding the telescope. She shivers as she wipes the lens, wishing that she had the ability to cast even a simple warming charm. Then she looks back up to the sky and gasps, wondering whether what she’s seeing is a reality or a hallucination or just plain wishful thinking.

There was meant to be nothing on the moon but craters, craters in the vague shape of a grimacing face. Instead, clear as anything, Ginny can see the truth. The man on the moon is a beautiful lady.

* * *

Ginny doesn’t tell anyone about her discovery. Her brothers and her friends are all busy, and rightly so, busy working and rebuilding and living in ways that she can’t anymore. Maybe that’s why she so desperately wants something that’s hers, just hers. She no longer has magic, and her weakened lungs make flying at high speeds impossible. There’s nothing left of what she was before the war, and that makes her little hobby all the more precious.

She doesn’t talk to the Muggles she works alongside at the Ottery St Catchpole coffee shop. She doesn’t talk to anyone, not really. She steams milk and pours espresso and wonders if this is it, if this is what she has the rest of her life to look forward to. There’s precious little else she’s qualified for without her magic. She supposes that she could ask Hermione whether there are ways to get certificates and things without having gone to Muggle schools, but most days there doesn’t seem to be much of a point. She had never been great shakes at schoolwork - anything beyond waving her wand and saying the right words went right over her head. Muggle schools would only be worse.

It was only a few days after that first glimpse of her that Ginny sees the lady on the moon again. She’s walking home after closing the shop, jumpy from the darkness but unwilling to force her parents or brothers to pick her up when she should be able to do this in the blink of an eye. There’s a rustling in one of the allys between rows of shops, and Ginny freezes.

It’s probably just a fox. It  _ has  _ to be just a fox, or maybe a squirrel or a badger. It can’t be a Snatcher or a Death Eater or one of the Carrows, she can’t be cornered away from the Room of Requirement yet again, she doesn’t even have her wand. She doesn’t even have her  _ magic _ -

“Hello,” a voice says. Ginny’s eyes snap up from where she’s been counting the bricks on the alley wall, her carefully regulated breathing skyrocketing again, only to see a beautiful, faintly glowing girl about her own age. “Oh, I’m sorry. I didn’t meant to frighten you.”

“I’m not scared of you,” Ginny says. The girl reaches out. Ginny flinches as her hand touches her shoulder, but then, amazingly, she relaxes.

“There,” the girl says. “That’s better, I think.” Now that she’s not in the middle of an ill-timed panic attack, Ginny can truly take in her savior’s appearance. The girl is still glowing, but even without that she would have been striking. Her hair is light blonde, almost white, and her eyes are as dark as a moonless night and seem almost too large and wide for her face. She’s wearing a robe made of some floating, subtly glittering material. She looks as though someone took every galaxy in the sky and distilled them down to one being.

“Wait,” Ginny says, “you’re - you’re her. You’re the lady on the moon.” The other girl’s face breaks into the same expression that Ginny’s memorized thoughout so many nights of searching for something, a blinding, slightly spacey smile.

“Oh, so you did figure it out!” she says. “I thought you had, but I didn’t want to presume. So many people look at me, but you’re the first one I thought really  _ saw _ me.” She holds out her hand. “I’m Luna. Pleasure to meet you.” Ginny takes her hand numbly, and Luna giggles. “Oh! I’ve always wanted to do that. Thank you, that was lovely.”

“No problem,” Ginny says. “Look, no offense - I mean, I’m really glad to meet you, really-” That’s like saying Harry’s really famous, or Voldemort was really evil. Understatement of the century. “But why are you here?  _ How _ are you here?” Luna’s still smiling at her serenely, apparently not put off at all by Ginny’s complete inability to use words.

“I’m here because I wanted to be,” she says. “As I said, I’ve seen plenty of people on Earth, but you’re the first one who saw  _ me _ . You’re the first one it was worth making the effort to come here for.”

“Oh,” says Ginny.

“Now,” says Luna. “I think I would like to meet some other people on this planet. Would you care to introduce me?” A bolt of jealousy shoots through Ginny, but she swallows it down.

“Sure,” she says. “Sounds great.”

* * *

The fact that Mum seems so shocked when Ginny brings Luna back to the Burrow only puts her in a worse mood. Before the Battle of Hogwarts, she was more popular than George and Charlie put together. It would have been more surprising for her to  _ not _ have brought someone back to stay the night. As it is, Ginny is alone, and no one in her family has any idea of how to make her get back to normal again.

“Mum, this is Luna,” she says. “Luna, this is my Mum.”

“I’m so pleased to meet you, dear,” Mum says. She sends Ginny a suddenly worried look.

“What?” Ginny says.

“Is she, you know…” Mum trails off. “We don’t want any trouble with the Statute.” Ginny shrugs. She figures that “she’s the moon” might be enough to qualify Luna as “not Muggle,” but she doesn’t feel like uncorking the bottle of emotions that would undoubtably come from admiting that to Mum. After all the lectures from Dad about making new friends, friends who  _ didn’t _ have magic, and all the assurances from Mum that her relationships with her magical friends needn’t be changed by the fact that she was suddenly a Squib… Well, it would be complicated. Complicated is the opposite of what she wants right now.

“Oh, you don’t have to worry about me, ma’am,” Luna says. Mum melts instantly.

“Oh, just call me Molly, dear,” she says. “Ginny, why don’t you take Luna up to your room? I’ll call you down when I have something on the table.”

“That sounds great,” Ginny says quickly, pulling Luna inside before she can protest. Still, she sees the way Mum looks at her as she rushes up the stairs, and she knows that she can tell that something’s up.

“Why didn’t you want me to talk with your mother?” Luna says after Ginny slams her bedroom door behind them. Ginny turns and blushes. Seeing Luna, the actual goddamn moon, standing in the middle of her room makes it obvious just how much astronomy has taken over her life. There are star charts on the walls, telescopes cluttering up the corners, the little scale model of the solar system that Ron gave her for her birthday sitting on the nightstand. If Luna had been anything other than what she was, it would have looked like the room of a stalker.

“I didn’t-” Luna takes a step towards her, and Ginny falls silent.

“Don’t lie to me,” Luna says. “I’ve watched you just as much as you’ve watched me. I’ve seen the way you act, and you didn’t want me to talk with your mother.”

“It’s nothing,” Ginny says.

“Do you think I’d frighten her?” Luna says.

“No!”

“Then why?”

“Because-” Ginny makes a frustrated noise in the back of her throat. “You know why, you  _ must _ know why.” Luna shakes her head. “I don’t have magic anymore, okay?”

“And why should that matter?”

“I just - I don’t have magic anymore. There was a battle and I got hit by a spell and now - Well, and now I’m like this. I’m - I’m just a Squib.” Luna’s still staring at her, a faint furrow deepening between her eyebrows. “So - So that’s why I saw you in the first place. I don’t have any magic of my own, so I try to make up for it by using a magic telescope and looking at shit. I’m a fraud.”

“In what way are you a fraud?” Luna says. Ginny opens her mouth to respond, but then Luna shakes her head. “No, you aren’t a fraud. You’re sad, and you’re confused, and you have Wrackspurts flying around you making it worse - But you are not a fraud.”

“I shouldn’t have even been able to see you.”

“But you did,” Luna says. “And, Ginny, I told you that you were the first to ever see me. It doesn’t have anything to do with magic. You have to  _ want _ it.”

“Want it?” Ginny says. At the back of her mind, she remembers the Carrows trying to teach her to be Unforgiveable, trying to teach her to mean it, to want it. This, though, this feels different.

“Want to see me,” Luna says. And then, suddenly, she looks uncertain. “Maybe… maybe something else as well. Something more.”

Ginny’s been here before. Michael Corner, Dean Thomas, even Harry - She’d thought that she’d wanted something with them. Except for Harry, they’d all fallen away when it became clear that her magic wasn’t returning, and even with Harry it was more because he’d recognized that they were broken in similar ways. If that was love, she might have been able to love him, but she’s not so stupid as to think that’s it’s that simple. Harry’s better than a brother, better than a friend, but she’s not in love with him. He’s not even in love with her, as much as he wants to be.

But this - mutually reaching across an abyss, searching without any evidence that there was anything to search for - this feels more like what love might be like.

“I’m not going to get better,” Ginny says. “I - So many people thought I would. Now everyone that’s left is family or- well, or people who can understand. I don’t think you’re like that.”

“Maybe I’m not,” Luna says. “I haven’t had my magic ripped away from me like that. I  _ can’t _ understand, not like some people might be able to. But, Ginny, I can understand being alone. I’ve been alone my whole life - and for the most part I’ve been content. You’re the only one I’ve been able to leave that for.”

“You’ll have to go back, won’t you?” Ginny says, already resigning herself.

“Yes,” Luna admits. “I only have a few nights before the moon begins to wane again and I have to go back. But I don’t have to go back alone.” Ginny stares at her.

“What do you mean?”

“Come with me,” Luna says. “You - You don’t have to stay, not forever, but we could make a life there. You could leave the Wrackspurts behind on Earth and come live with me.”

“And I could come back?”

“At full moon,” Luna confirms. “For a visit or for good. I wouldn’t try to stop you.”

Ginny looks around her room. Once upon a time, she’d had plans. She’d wanted to defeat Voldemort and the Death Eaters, and after that she’d wanted to play Quidditch professionally. Those dreams are gone now, fulfilled or dashed by random chance. But over the past year her little hobby has grown and transfigured itself into a new dream, a dream she hadn’t even realized she had until now. It would be crazy and scary and wild, but Ginny thinks she might have to take the chance.

“Just to confirm,” she says, “when you say that you want something more, you  _ do _ mean…” Luna smiles and steps forward, pressing their bodies against one another. Her glow seems to permiate Ginny’s pores, filling her with more warmth and strength than she’s felt in… years, really. Since before the war, before Hogwarts, when the worst thing she had to worry about was whether her brothers would find out that she’d been borrowing their brooms.

“Yes,” Luna says. She kisses her on the cheek. Ginny turns her head to meet her lips, deepening the kiss to something that she swears could magically make them one being.

“In that case,” Ginny says a bit breathlessly, “I think I have to pack.”


End file.
